MONTREAL—With Mayor Gerald Tremblay taking the weekend off amid growing calls for his resignation, the crisis of confidence at city hall continued on Friday.
Expectations were also beginning to mount as to what Tremblay will say when he is back on the job next week. If the mayor hands in his resignation after Monday, city council gets to name a successor.
The tension has left the city’s municipal politicians an unruly lot, as they either belong to a party in crisis or a party raring to take over. No matter what flag they are flying, no one seems to have an easy solution for fixing Montreal’s problems.
A senior member of the mayor’s party, Union Montreal Councillor Helen Fotopoulos was at an event in the West Island on Friday, but she was showered with questions about Tremblay.
"The mayor has to make his decisions; he's taken time off to rest and to reflect," said Fotopoulos, adding that Michael Applebaum’s announcement that tax hikes might be reconsidered was a smart one.
“Smart” isn't the word that Westmount Mayor Peter Trent would use to describe backtracking on a budget that was already tabled.
“You can't, in two weeks, muck around with a budget and all of a sudden knock off a whole bunch of numbers. I don't believe in that kind of budgeting and all you're really doing is pushing the costs into the next year anyway,” said Trent.
Trent is a leading a coalition of mayors in the Greater Montreal Area who are opposing a tax increase that sees rates across the region increase by over three per cent.
At a Super C supermarket in Riviere-des-Prairies, Vision Montreal leader Louise Harel was busy shaking hands, with a byelection scheduled in the area just over a week away.
The idea of revising the city’s 2013 budget was perhaps the only thing that the opposition leader was willing to say that the ruling Union Montreal is doing right these days.
“It’s necessary because people feel frustrated, exhausted, revolted because they won't pay the price of the collusion and the corruption,” said Harel.
The opposition leader added that she is anxious to hear what Tremblay has to say when he returns to city hall on Monday, and that whatever happens, she thinks things can't get much worse than they are right now.
